ease in the fields or improved their minds with reading and conversation.
[Snowball designs a windmill and eventually the animals begin to build it. Napoleon chases Snowball off the farm and assumes total power.]
All that year the animals worked like slaves. But they were happy in their work; they grudged no effort or sacrifice, well aware that everything that they did was for the benefit of themselves and those of their kind who would come after them, and not for a pack of idle, thieving human beings.
Throughout the spring and summer they worked a sixty-hour week, and in August Napoleon announced that there would be work on Sunday afternoons as well. This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half. Even so, it was found necessary to leave certain tasks undone. The harvest was a little less successful than in the previous year, and two fields which should have been sown with roots in the early summer were not sown because the ploughing had not been completed early enough. It was possible to foresee that the coming winter would be a hard one.
The windmill presented unexpected difficulties. There was a good quarry of limestone on the farm, and plenty of sand and cement had been found in one of the outhouses, so that all of the materials for building were at hand. But the problem the animals could not solve was how to break up the stones into pieces of suitable size.
…
Huge boulders, far too big to be used as they were, were lying all over the bed of the quarry. The animals lashed ropes round these, and then all together, cows, horses, sheep, any animal that could lay hold of the rope – even the pigs sometimes joined in at critical moments – dragged them with desperate slowness up the slope to the top of the quarry, where they were toppled over the edge, to shatter to pieces below. Transporting the stone once it was broken was comparatively simple. The horses carried it off in cartloads, the sheep dragged single blocks, even Muriel and Benjamin yoked themselves into an old governess-cart and did their share. By late summer a sufficient store of stone had accumulated, and then the building began, under the superintendence of the pigs.
Suddenly, early in the spring, an alarming thing was discovered. Snowball was secretly frequenting the farm by night! The animals were so disturbed that they could hardly sleep in their stalls. Every night, it was said, he came creeping in under cover of darkness and performed all kinds of mischief. He stole the corn, he upset the milk-pails, he broke the eggs, he trampled the seedbeds, he gnawed the bark off the fruit trees. Whenever anything went wrong it became usual to attribute it to Snowball. If a window was broken or a drain blocked up, someone was certain to say that Snowball had come in the night and done it, and when the key of the store-shed was lost, the whole farm was convinced that Snowball had thrown it down the well. Curiously enough, they went on believing this even after the mislaid key was found under a sack of meal.
[From: Animal Farm by George Orwell. 1976. London: Searcher and Warburg/Octopus]
Post-reading:
1.Discuss these questions with a partner:
a. Look at the references to Snowball and Napoleon. What do you learn about each character from this extract?
b. How does what happens to Snowball already deviate from what Major preached? Quote from the first chapter to substantiate your answer.
2. You know about the causes of climate change from what you read earlier in the cycle. Are the animals on the farm contributing to it in any way by what they are planning? Support your answers.
3. Can you relate what is going on in the extracts to any real life situation you know about?
Poem
| Here is information that can help you understand a poem. You can apply it to all poetry reading, including the unseen poem you will be given in your literature exams.Ask these two questions of any poem that you read:What is being said? This means you look for the main ideas, the themeHow do I know? This means you look at the ways in which the poet puts across the ideas.Writers write because they have something to say. We study the text to support, confirm, clarify and reveal what it is that they have to say. To do this, we look at figurative language, the way sentences, verse lines and the poem as a whole is presented, the choice of images, rhythm, pace and sound, and at the feelings that such images cause. Through this activity we try to see what the poet is saying. It is not often that we can come to any final conclusions. Reading poetry involves interpretation, and different readers will have different conclusions. |
| To understand the poet’s message, then, we look at:literal meaningfigurative meaningmood and emotionstheme and messageimagery, figures of speech, word choice, tone, rhetorical devices, emotional responses, lines, words, verses, links, punctuation, refrain, repetition, sound devices (alliteration, consonance and assonance, rhyme, rhythm, onomatopoeia and enjambment) |
| Vocabulary help:assonance: repetition of inner vowel sounds of nearby words that do not rhyme, e.g. yellow wedding dressconsonance: repetition of inner vowels in nearby words that don’t rhyme, e.g. dove/waveenjambment: run-on linesimagery: the word pictures createdonomatopoeia: where the sound of a word illustrates its meaning, e.g. hiss, buzzrhetorical devices: all devices used to persuade or have an effect on the readertheme: the main idea, general idea or concept of a piece of writingtone: this indicates the emotions, e.g. anger, sadness, delight |
We know that one of the consequences of global warming and climate change is that people are forced to leave their country which is no longer able to provide them with food because of drought or flooding or because of civil war over land and power. They become refugees in another country. The poem in the activity below gives a poignant example of suffering caused by famine.
Activity 1.7 - Reading a poem (individual)
Pre-reading:
Skim the poem to get an idea of what it is about and then read it softly to yourself, confirming your ideas (during reading).
Refugee mother and child
by Chinua Achebe
1 No Madonna and Child could touch
2 That picture of a mother’s tenderness
3 For a son she soon would have to forget.
4 The air was heavy with odours
5 of diarrhoea of unwashed children
6 with washed-out ribs and dried-up
7 bottoms struggling in laboured
8 steps behind blown empty bellies. Most
9 mothers there had long ceased
10 to care but not this one; she held 10
11 a ghost smile between her teeth
12 and in her eyes the ghost of a mother’s
13 pride as she combed the rust-coloured
14 hair left on his skull and then –
15 singing in her eyes – began carefully
16 to part it … In another life this
17 would have been a little daily
18 act of no consequence before his
19 breakfast and school; now she
20 did it like putting flowers
21 on a tiny grave.
[From Beware Soul Brother by Chinua Achebe. Heinemann]
Post-reading:
1. Answer the following questions in writing:
a. Briefly describe the situation the mother and child are in.
b. Make a list of all the evidence that points to the state the child is in and what this suggests. You can use a table like the one